The Blazing World

  A few notes on the windows. The first one we saw was an illuminated box underneath the floor. When you crouched down and looked through the glass, you saw two full-face caramel-colored masks with big empty eyes, a roll of cotton gauze—the kind one finds in every basic first-aid kit—a black crayon, and a piece of white paper with two vertical lines drawn on it. This window returned throughout the maze, both on the floor and on walls, a visual mantra. Sometimes we ran into an exact replica of that first box, but at other times we noted slight and not-so-slight variations on the theme, which Marcelo and I began to track once we had settled into the game: The masks had been placed closer to each other or a little farther apart. The crayon was a deep gray, not black. The two lines on the paper were at an angle rather than vertical. The two lines crossed. The lines lay on their sides horizontally. The gauze had been partially unrolled. The gauze was stained with rusty brown spots. A pair of scissors now lay beside one of the masks. A mask had been sliced through the cheek and eye. The pair of scissors had disappeared, and the paper was blank.

  There were window films, too, inset in the walls, that reappeared throughout the maze without any noticeable differences, at least none that we could see.

  1. Rune sits motionless at a table with a cup of coffee on the table in front of him as he looks out the window at a cloudless blue sky. I watched this boring movie for a while. The man breathes, of course. His chest expands and contracts, his nostrils wiggle a little, and at one point he moves his left hand about half an inch.

  2. A camera moves slowly past one charred, mutilated car body after another on Church Street, vehicles incinerated in the catastrophic heat. It must have been filmed only days later.

  3. A camera pans the window of a shoe store. Through the unbroken glass, we looked at rows of children’s shoes that had been neatly paired on graduated steps for display: Mary Janes, sneakers with Velcro straps, sturdy little oxfords and boots. Not a single shoe or boot had been disarranged, but they were all thickly covered in the pale dust of 9/11. Footwear for ghosts.

  4. Large snowflakes fall slowly onto a wet sidewalk.

  I didn’t notice the cracks in the walls until we had been losing ourselves inside the maze for about twenty minutes. They were clues. The closer one came to the exit, the more cracks there were. They were not obvious. The texture of the walls changed by increments. Tiny cracks like spiderwebs or broken blood vessels began to mottle the white walls, becoming denser and denser as one neared the exit. Marcelo didn’t notice these veins at all. They were, as the saying goes, hiding in plain sight.

  Finally, there were peepholes drilled into three of the maze’s dead ends. These were my favorites. I love peeping. Maybe we all do. When I peeked into the first one we happened upon, I saw a small TV screen deep inside the wall, maybe fifteen inches away from my eyeball. Two tiny figures wearing black masks over their faces, identical caps that concealed their heads, loose dark tunics, and pants stood face to face in a blank room. After a couple of seconds, the two began to waltz, step-two-three, step-two-three, and then they fell into the lilting turns of the dance. It was pleasing and I danced along a little, to Marcelo’s embarrassment, but then the rhythm sped up and went wrong. Like a pair of automatons, the couple’s motion became rigid and mechanical but also out of whack with each other. They danced faster and faster, circling madly and stumbling into each other, until I felt dizzy just watching them, and then the figure I took to be the woman—I think because the other person had rested his hand on her back—tripped and fell. With a violent tug, the man yanked her back to her feet, pulled her body close to him and back into the dance, which began to resemble an upright wrestling match. She twisted and squirmed. She hammered at his arms and tried to release herself from his grasp. They bumped blindly into the wall, but the man held on tightly, and then, without warning, the woman went limp. Her head fell backward, her knees buckled, and her arms fell to her sides. Then the little narrative began again.

  This sequence couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of minutes. In the two other peephole films, this sequence was repeated exactly but given another ending. After the woman has collapsed, the man continues his lunatic waltz, but his once-solid human partner has been replaced by a spineless rag doll. The man shakes the doll hard, throws off its mask and cap to reveal an airy nothing, a Ms. Nobody. He lets the bundle fall to the floor, kicks the withered, unoccupied rags in disgust, and walks offscreen. In the third peep show, the one that was just around the corner from the exit, the sequence repeats itself up to this point; but once the man has left the stage, the heap of rags reconfigures by some movie magic into the living dancer, who then spreads her arms and begins to levitate toward the ceiling, slowly rising until only her feet are visible at the top of the screen, and then they, too, disappear. A fairy-tale ending.

  Marcelo and I emerged a little dazed from our wanderings. The open space of the gallery beyond the maze came as a relief. I spotted Rune in the noisy crowd, dressed down in jeans, black T-shirt, and a sports jacket, chatting away, a cool customer. I’ve loved that phrase since I was a kid because I’ve always wanted to be one, and I’ve always wondered where the expression came from—a person in a store pretending he doesn’t like the goods, driving the salesperson mad? I told Marcelo that I wanted to scout out the cool customer and so we moved closer to the art star and gossiped about him from our corner. Marcelo thought Rune had a John Wayne–ish feel to him, and I agreed. Wayne’s gunslinger had a touch of swish to him, a bit of the girl in his walk, hips swaying under his holster, with those cute little steps of his. Rune had it, too, that give in his hips. We like our movie stars androgynous, whether we know it or not, both boys and girls.

  I looked for Harry, but my dear giantess wasn’t in the room. We spotted an actress from a TV show but couldn’t remember her name, and after a few minutes, Marcelo pronounced the party more bruising than festive, and we made our retreat. From what I could tell it looked like a hit, a big deal, not the little deal our Suffocation Rooms had been, although I have to say I love those heated-up rooms as much as the maze—no, more. When we left the gallery, the line extended all the way down the block. Marcelo and I strolled over to Tenth Avenue to look for a restaurant, and there, standing alone on the corner, in a Burberry trench coat and a green cloche, was Harry. After the three-way multiple-kissing ritual, I told her the maze was great and congrats, et cetera, et cetera, but she didn’t reply. It was dark on the street, but not so dark that I couldn’t see she looked stunned. I gathered that she hadn’t been to the show yet, and I asked her why. She shook her head slowly, her forehead wrinkling. I asked her to join us for a bite, but she refused. After a few more bids to convince her met with no success, Marcelo and I left her.

  The parting from Harry tugged at me all evening, and I talked too much about it over my angel hair pasta, which annoyed Marcelo, and we had a spat. Of course, Marcelo had never lived with Harry. She’d never rubbed his back during a Bette Davis movie. He’d never seen her sit and talk quietly to the Barometer about his drawings to calm him down when he needed it or seen her quietly checking on the skinny madman at night to make sure he put Neosporin on his scratches. And Marcelo hadn’t seen Harry twirling around the room in the long violet shantung dress I helped her pick out at Bergdorf’s, singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” at the top of her lungs before her sixtieth-birthday party. I couldn’t blame Marcelo for what he didn’t know.

  Richard Brickman

  (letter to the editor in The Open Eye: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art and Perception Studies, Fall 2003)

  To the Editor,

  Ten days ago, I received a sixty-five-page letter delivered to me the old-fashioned way, through the U.S. Post Office. Why Harriet Burden, the author of the letter, entitled “Missive from the Realm of Fictional Being,” chose me as her confessor, I don’t quite know, but she said that she had read my paper published in the pages of this journal and thought my interest in the philosophy of sel
f and the dynamics of perception made me a good recipient for her “revelation.” After verifying that a person named Harriet Burden does, in fact, exist, that she is an artist who a number of years ago exhibited her work in New York City, and that the three artists featured in her letter are also actual persons, I decided to accept her invitation to write my own letter about her letter in these pages. Burden’s “missive” is far too long to be published in full. Its style, at once peculiar and various, includes circumlocutions, elaborate tangents, extravagant quotation, as well as terse philosophical sentences and argumentative leaps which distance it from every standard readers have come to expect from an academic journal. Although I cannot agree with her conclusions, or with her mode of expression (which occasionally veers toward the fervid, exclamatory, and vulgar), I find Burden’s artistic experiment an interesting one, and I believe the readers of The Open Eye will find the material broadly relevant to their concerns.

  Although this journal is committed to ongoing conversations among various disciplines, its pages have underscored the difficulties involved in such dialogues because epistemological approaches vary. The burgeoning research on perception in the neurosciences, Anglo-American analytical philosophy, a more unorthodox strain of thought that has emerged out of European phenomenology, as well as poststructuralist theory offer different answers to the question: How do we see?

  Studies on change blindness (subjects missing blatant alterations in their visual field) and inattentional blindness (subjects who fail to notice an intrusive presence when attending to a task) suggest that, at the very least, there is much around us that we simply do not perceive. The role of learning in perception has also been crucial to understanding predictive visual schemas, which lend some support to constructionist theories of perception.I Most of the time we see what we expect to see; it is the surprise of novelty that forces us to adjust those schemas. Blindsight studies and masking studies have further illustrated how unconscious perceptions can and do shape our attitudes, thoughts, and emotions.II Burden appears to have closely followed the debates on perception and taken inspiration from various writers and researchers, some of whose papers have appeared in The Open Eye. On the second page of her letter, she asks what happens when a person looks at a work of art and produces the following sober formulations:

  “I” and “you” hide in “it.” In this view, subject and object cannot be easily separated.

  If we had no past visual experiences, we could not make sense of the visible world. Without repetition, the seen world is nonsense.

  Every visible object is an emotional object. It attracts or repels. If it does neither, the thing cannot last in the mind, and it has no meaning. Emotionally charged objects stay alive in memory.

  But the subliminal forces of an invisible underground also exercise a pull on us. More often than not, we do not know why we feel what we feel when we look at an art object.

  In the letter, Harriet Burden claims responsibility for creating the works that appeared in three solo exhibitions in New York City: The History of Western Art by Anton Tish, The Suffocation Rooms by Phineas Q. Eldridge, and, most recently, Beneath by the artist known as Rune. Her articulated motive is simple: “I wanted to see how the reception of my art changed, depending on the persona of each mask.” She pointedly maintains that when she showed work under her own name in the past, few were interested, but her pseudonymous art, presented behind three “living male masks,” piqued the interest of both dealers and the public, albeit to varying degrees. Burden refers to this as the “masculine enhancement effect,” and she is quick to say that it affects women viewers as much as men:

  The crowd is not divided by sex. The crowd is of one mind, and that mind is swayed and seduced by ideas. Here is a thing made by a woman. It stinks of sex. I smell it. All intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls (odorless, of course). The pecker and beanbags need not be real. Oh no, the mere idea that they exist will suffice to goad the crowd into greater appreciation. Hence, I resort to the mental codpiece. Hail Aristophanes! Hail the fictional rod, the magic wand that opens eyes onto unseen worlds.

  Burden’s admittedly hyperbolic argument is that her retreat behind men not only eliminated antifemale bias but that maleness augments the value of intellectual work and art objects for the public, which she posits as a kind of undifferentiated collective mind—clearly a rhetorical exaggeration.III That bias exists, however, seems undeniable. An experiment designed with three female artists as well as the three male ones would have allowed a comparison between the two groups, but even under those circumstances, there are so many variables at work in the reception of any given artist’s creations that what Burden calls her “fairy tale constructed in three acts” may be ultimately elusive in terms of what it actually means. The New York art world can hardly be thought of as a laboratory of controlled circumstances. Furthermore, had the artworks been identical in each case, it would have been much easier to draw a conclusion from Burden’s experiment. There have, in fact, been many studies on the perception of race, gender, as well as age, most of which, but not all, reveal biases, often unconscious, and which vary from culture to culture.

  Burden’s commentary on her second “fictional construct” or mask, Phineas Q. Eldridge, takes up the question of race and sexuality as essential factors in the perception of the exhibition she produced for him.

  My two white boys, sleeping with the Other, as far as we know, anyway, are creatures without impediments to the bursting fullness of their particular characters. In other words, they have no identity. An oxymoron? No. Their freedom lies precisely in this: They cannot be defined by what they are not—not men, not straight, not white. And in this absence of circumscribed being, they are allowed to flourish in all their specificity. He picks his nose. He’s a dullard, a genius. He sings off-key. He reads Merleau-Ponty. His work will live in posterity. The art I made for them, for Tish and Rune, exists here and now without a single crippling adjective. But my Phinny mask, gay and black or black and gay, which hides my long white womanly face, pinches hard.

  The presence of a hermaphrodite figure in Burden’s second show, The Suffocation Rooms, seems to have precipitated the reactions of reviewers, creating what she calls “the blindness of context,” a radical externalization and reduction of a person’s identity to stable and thus limiting categories of marginality. Burden duly credits her feminist sources—Simone de Beauvoir, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Judith Butler, Toril Moi, Elizabeth Wilson among them. Burden insists on ambiguity as a philosophical position, and furiously denies hard binary oppositions, even on the biological level of human sexuality, a view which, frankly, situates her as an extremist, one alien to my own position.IV

  The letter takes a further turn into theories of self. Again, Burden seems to be aware of the philosophical and scientific debates on the nature of the self, and her letter escorts the reader on a convoluted path from Homer to the Stoics to Vico, leaping forward to W. T. H. Myers’s subliminal self, to Janet, Freud, and James, to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness and intersubjectivity and then to contemporary infant research, as well as neuroscience findings about primordial selves, and locationist hypotheses which focus on the hypothalamus and periaqueductal gray areas of the brain, as well as a Finnish scholar, Pauli Pylkkö, who advances a notion of “aconceptual mind,” and an obscure novelist and essayist, Siri Hustvedt, whose position Burden calls “a moving target.” As far as I can tell, Burden attempts to undermine all conceptual borders, which, I believe, define human experience itself. I cannot say that her wild romp into the more peculiar aspects of continental philosophy convinced me. The woman flirts with the irrational.V

  That notwithstanding, the artist’s stated ambition is to dismantle conventional modes of vision, to insist on her “unfet
tered personas” as “a medium of flight.” She staunchly maintains that adopting the masks allowed her greater fluidity as an artist, an ability to locate herself elsewhere, to alter her gestures, and to live out “a liberating duplicity and ambiguity.” Each artist mask became for Burden a “poetized personality,” a visual elaboration of a “hermaphroditic self,” which cannot be said to belong to either her or to the mask, but to “a mingled reality created between them.”

  This declaration is, of course, a purely subjective one, but then the arts are not about objectivity. Burden’s experiment might be better named a performance or performance narrative. She regards the three exhibitions as a trio that together comprise a single work called Maskings, which has a strong theatrical and narrative component because she insists that it includes the reviews, notices, ads, and commentary the shows have generated, which she refers to as “the proliferations.” The proliferations, of which this essay is presumably one, project Burden’s fictional, poetized personalities into the broader conversation about art and perception.

  Richard Brickman

  * * *

  I. Burden as Brickman is referring to poststructuralist, continental theory, which maintains that perception of things in the world is socially created (constructed) and maintained in cultural tradition. If, as some recent science suggests, human perception is shaped by expectation, then the constructionists, Brickman argues, have a point.

  II. Blindsight is the name given to a condition in patients who, despite lesions in their primary visual cortex, retain visual capacities but insist they can see nothing. When presented with an object and asked to identify it, these patients guess correctly at a much higher level than chance, which implies that what they are missing is the awareness of an object they have registered implicitly. See Lawrence Weiskrantz, “Blindsight Revisited,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 6 (1996): 215–20. In visual masking studies, a visual stimulus, “the target,” becomes less visible due to interactions with other stimuli that are called “masks.” For example, when a target stimulus is presented to a viewer and then immediately followed by a mask, the target is rendered invisible. Nevertheless, research has demonstrated that the content of the target image can have a subliminal effect on the subject. See Hannula et al., “Masking and Implicit Perception,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 (2005), 247–55.